Kit and Olivia welcome you all to the Stretch Therapy Community!

Via this newsletter, we realise that we are speaking to a very diverse group. There are all of our original members, gained over the 35 years Stretch Therapy has been running, including all of our students and teachers around the world. The second group joined us more recently with the Stretching & Flexibility PDF giveaway promotion. The last group includes everyone who has joined us via our YouTube presence, and all the people who have joined us since we launched the new Stretch Therapy website. All together we are about 50,000 people, and we are a community.

There are many elements to the Stretch Therapy method which we will be talking about in the next few emails, but today we want to focus on one of the most fundamental yet least practised elements of the system: deep relaxation. As never before in human history this era highlights the absolute necessity of learning how to relax deeply – really deeply and as a felt experience (and not as a concept – we know everyone would like to be able to relax 😀).

Being able to relax fully is essential to being able to feel what's going on inside your body. Your body is talking to you in a very quiet voice, all the time every day, but most of us are distracted and the mind is very busy, and we have vested interest in ignoring the body's voice. Much in modern life conspires to make you more tense, and to distract you from the feelings in your own body – and if those feelings have been painful for a while, the mind has a vested interest in disconnecting you from the sensations – obsessive thinking takes their place. If the human being is to evolve from this point, we have to change this reflexive pattern. We have a number of effective ways of doing this. To this end, we are working on a new program, whose working title is Deep Well Being: more on this later.

The body relaxation techniques have been an incredible resource for me. I experience a lot of anxiety and hold a lot of tension in the body, I practice yoga and contemporary dance as a way to enjoy life and relieve tension but I have to say these practices never really gave me the release that the body relaxation techniques do which is really incredible.

I love that they are just 15–20 minutes yet so effective, and imagining the cat-like state was so helpful for me, I definitely had not experienced a state of real relaxation before doing these. Thank you so much for sharing these resources.

Sinead C., Ireland